Contrary to conventional wisdom, people tend to wind down rather than whip themselves into a frenzy while browsing Facebook and Twitter, according to a prize-winning dissertation by Galen Panger, a newly minted Ph.D. from UC Berkeley’s School of Information.

In 2008, Ken-ichi Ueda and several other students at the University of California, Berkeley, founded iNaturalist as an online community for biologists, citizen scientists and people who simply enjoyed observing wildlife.